Day 519

The break room had been left as it was for the past seventy years yet still looked as fresh as it had the day they all died. Papers sat neatly stacked waiting for the meetings that never happened, half drunk cups of coffee were scattered about work desks like a careless child's toys.

Amidst this frozen normality lay what remained of the workers, clothes fused to the ground by a mix of dried blood and pus that looked startlingly fresh. Partially congealed, it was a stark reminder of the disease that had wiped out most if the isolated town. Its sickly sweet smell permeated the entire office block, sinking into the ground and coating everything inside with sticky yellow residue

Few lived through the plague and none remained within the town after. Most of the survivors were herded up the second the disease showed signs of recession and none have been seen since. It is thought that they are still infected, kept alive in an attempt to cure the incurable but only succeeding in prolonging the inevitable.

Smaller outbreaks of this sickness have occurred since within similar isolated communities, often ones that had societal connections to Area Zero, as the town was now known. The only difference between these cases and the first is that there were no deaths as such. However the townsfolk remain in an... altered state for the foreseeable future.

Their skin is full of cracks and their clothing fused to them - right to the very core. In all cases it seems to be that they are held together by pus and some kind of weblike material somehow spun from within the infected body. Tests show it to be made from bone yet it remains as flexible as human hair, twice as durable and in a constant state of growth. Infected report no pain from this.

Alongside the physical, mental alterations have been found as well. The brains within the original infected seems to have grown and shifted so that the tissue extends all along the spinal column in a thick, ropey chord so densely coated with the bone-webbing that getting a sample is impossible.

The infected patients seem happy though, reporting elevated levels of self satisfaction and positive body image. Only some of the younger ones are more able to vocalise this as the throat is often distended by the thickening and expansion of the brain tissue which renders speech unintelligible.

They all report feeling stronger despite their muscles being shredded by the bone-web and pus combination. One particular case (here to be known as patient 4692) insisted that they hadn't been changed in any way by the illness. 4692 claimed that they had been born like this alongside all the others and that the disease was just "a step up the evolutionary ladder".